Now you can have that nose you’ve always wanted without plastic surgery. Slide your nose into this baby three times a day and just wait for beauty to arrive.
You’ll probably want to take it off before going outside, though. It’s a little scary.
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Yeah, they’re big and mean and their bite can kill you three different ways, but fortunately you’re not likely to run into one. They’re komodo dragons and they can get around ten feet tall. Or long, actually. And oh yeah, about that bite – a komodo’s saliva contains 50 to 80 different kinds of bacteria, which go straight into your bloodstream.
Plus if you don’t die of infections, there’s venom, too, and that ought to do the trick. Not to mention the fact that while you’re slowly dying of all that poison, it will probably start eating you.
Largest lizards on earth.
And elephants, you know, they can get up around 14,000 pounds, have skin an inch thick and brains that weigh more than your cat. (Assuming it’s healthy, your cat that is.)
Largest land mammals in the world.
And both are puny compared to the big reptiles that came before them. Fellows known as dinosaurs.
Listen to Wired.
Imagine a rhinoceros. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s a white rhinoceros. Don’t worry if you can’t envision every little anatomical flourish in your mind. We’re going to modify this beast a bit.
First thing’s first – lose the horn. We have no use for it. Next, lengthen the neck a bit. Not too much – we’re not turning this rhino into a giraffe – but enough so that the neck is slightly more than half the length of its back. Now for the legs. Stretch them out so that the rhino’s belly is a little higher off the ground. Scale the thing up until it stands about 18 feet at the shoulder and weighs about 17 tons, and you’re done.
What you have just made is a dead ringer for Paraceratherium, the largest land mammal of all time. This immense rhino – part of an entirely-extinct group of hornless rhinos called hyracodonts – lived in Asia between 37 and 23 million years ago, but even this giant would have been dwarfed by the dragons of earlier epochs. Futalognkosaurus, a sauropod dinosaur that was apparently elsewhere when the good names were being given out, stretched over 100 feet long from its tiny head to the tip of its tail, and it probably weighed in excess of 75 tons. The largest dinosaurs may have been even bigger still. Estimates based on the long-lost bones of the sauropod Amphicoelias reconstruct this dinosaur as being over 131 feet long and weighing in at over 122 tons. Compared to these giants, Paraceratherium seems rather puny.
So 131 feet long, 122 tons. The komodo dragon’s a snack.
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You know about Google Voice, right? One number that rings all your phones, or whichever ones you want to ring depending on time of day, day of week, who’s calling, etc. Plus, it saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text, blocks callers you don’t want and lets you listen while someone leaves a message. And they won’t even know you hate them.
Well, now you can use Google Voice with your real phone number instead of a special number issued by Google.
It sounds like a bit of a pain to set up, as described here at TechCrunch, but imagine the possibilities.
The feature costs $20 to enable, and it comes with plenty of strings attached. When you port your number away from your carrier, you’ll likely automatically cancel your existing contract and will be charged an early termination fee that can run hundreds of dollars. It’s possible to avoid this fee by getting a new number from your carrier and keeping the contract alive, but that process will involve calling the carrier (likely more than once) to help you through the process.
Once you’ve agreed to plenty of warnings and paid your $20, your number will be transfered to Google Voice within 24 hours. You won’t miss any calls, but there’s a three day window where you may be missing text messages.
It’s a hassle, but, having gone through it myself, I think it’s totally worth it. Whether you like being able to more effectively screen your calls, or you have multiple phones, or you just like making phone calls from Gmail (which is awesome), Google Voice packs a lot of power, and it’s likely going to become even more useful over the coming years.
Here’s a little tour of Google Voice. You’re going to want to sign up.
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They’re really smart, and if you think you can keep them out of your bird feeders, well good luck. Just watch this guy.
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Please don’t tell the copyright police. They were just irresistible. And you can learn all about them at boingboing.net, the wonderful website where these bots hang out.
Once you start stealing them, you can’t stop. It’s the road to ruin.
Go see the rest at Boing Boing. We send them traffic to alleviate our guilt.
And if you don’t want to steal them, make your own for your iPhone and iPad and other things i. Find out more at this awesome Kit-Robot website. Your speakers might not like it, but your eyes will.
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“Normally this isn’t particularly interesting to watch.” But when slowed down the miracle reveals itself.
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As you know, Santa’s modernizing. He got rid of Rudolph and the others and rides a bike now. He takes orders by cell phone, replaced his elves with Chinese peasants, and instead of books, he’s delivering eBook readers.
Our question is, how do we want our eBooks delivered? Nook? Kindle? Nook color? The Sony something or Other? iPad? iPhone? Android phone? Laptop? Electronic pigeon?
What the heck are we supposed to tell Santa?
Just look at all the ways you can read a nookBook, for instance.
Of course, this is a color nookBook and not an uncolor nookBook.
Why would you want one without color when you can have color? (The black and white uses special screen technology that’s easier on the eyes.) Or why not just get an iPad? After all, iPads have a nook app, which means you can buy Barnes & Noble eBooks and read them on your iPad. Of course, the iPad costs way more, is heavier, does a lot more, and you can’t read outside in daylight. But then you can’t do that with the nook color, either. You can, though, with a black and white Kindle or a black and white nook. And needless to say there’s also a Kindle iPad app. And we should mention that you can’t read a black and white Kindle or nook in the dark. It’s like a real book. You have to turn the light on.
Not to mention the fact that you can get apps for your iPhone or your android phone and just read nook and Kindle books that way. But if you go the app route, you’ll still have to decide where to buy your eBooks. You could buy them from the Apple iBoostore and forget apps, assuming you’re using an iPad or iPhone as your reader, but if you don’t want to be stuck with Apple, and if you’ve heard that their bookstore doesn’t have nearly as many books as Amazon or Barnes & Noble, you might want to choose one of the big bookstores and go the app route. By the way, did you know that Google just opened an eBooks store?
Which brings us to file format. Kindle’s is proprietary. Google’s…well, okay, are you getting the picture? It’s complicated, different readers at different prices with different capabilities and sizes using different file formats. Is there any way to simplify it all?
Probably not. So, here’s a few links to help you think it through. But what we really hope you’ll do is come over to the Sykesville Online Facebook page and join the discussion. You know, sort of form an Eldersburg/Sykesville hive mind, to use one of those weird terms that Wired Magazine likes to toss around. Tell us your experiences. Make recommendations. Please, come share. What works, what doesn’t?
Meanwhile, here’s the links.
From Best Buy. Prices, reviews and all.
bizrate’s supposed to find you the best deals.
Consumer Search is a great resource with a lot of good detail.
Here’s a handy chart from ebook reader review.
This one from Wireless Reading Device is a little dated, no color nook, but it includes the iPad.
eReader Leader breaks it out nicely.
So what do you think?
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Imagine if you could see art from outer space. Imagine making the earth your canvas. Imagine an artwork photographed by satellite.
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Imagine electronic legs.
Someday, maybe not that far in the future, we’ll all be part robot.
Imagine our deficiencies, our injuries, our damage, our limitations overcome by a symbiosis between ourselves, the computer, some hardware, and the brilliant creations of kind and talented human beings who don’t believe in limitations.
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